Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

August 20, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.20.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The text that guided the homily was: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will speak to us about the path to eternal life. On Monday, as you remember, we celebrated the solemnity of Mary’s Assumption, body and soul, into heaven. The Son of God came into the world so that each of us might spend eternity, body in soul, in heaven alongside her. In this Sunday’s Gospel, as Jesus is heading up to Jerusalem teaching the multitudes along the way, a person from the crowd asks him how many actually make it to heaven. Jesus’ response is as relevant to us today as it was to his auditors 2000 years ago.

* “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” the person inquires. It seemed to be a question flowing from curiosity. Jesus did not come down from heaven, however, to satisfy our curiosity. He came to save us and responded not by stating how many will be saved, but how that interlocutor and others will be saved: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” A similar thing happened at another time, when the disciples asked the Lord about the timing of the end of the world. “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Mt 24:3). Jesus replied not by supplying information they could put into their calendars, but by telling them how to be ready no matter when it occurred. In both cases, Jesus was not being evasive; rather he went beyond trivia to what is most important: making us aware of what we need to know and to do in order to experience the salvation he won for us.

* We can say, almost as an aside, that many in our world would do well to pay attention to what Jesus does not answer in the Gospel. Jesus’ failure to answer the question about the number of those to be saved shows the absurdity of groups, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who want to claim that they know the exact amount of people who are saved (144,000, taking literally a symbolic number used in Rev 14:1). It also shows the absurdity of many of those who found storefront churches and claim that they know for certain when the end of the world will be. Not only does Jesus not give us or them that information, but Jesus said in the Gospel that not even he knew when that would occur — only His Father knows (cf. Matt. 24:36 ).

* Even more than paying attention to what Jesus, in his answer, does not say, we must pay attention to what he does: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” This word, “strive,” in Greek is the same word we have for “agonize” and it’s used in a tense that means “keep on agonizing.” It points to the type of struggle and suffering Jesus says it will take to enter into his kingdom. To be saved, to enter the Kingdom, to get to Heaven, in other words, we need continuously to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to go into agony, to make the greatest, possibly most painful exertion of our life, to fit through a gate that is “narrow.” We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in training camp to make the cut, harder than gymnast works to make the Olympics and win the gold, harder than an immigrant father of large family works to ensure his family’s survival. The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s e...